Going With the Workflow

Workflow may not quite be the Rodney Dangerfield of software, but there's no doubt that insurance companies have higher priorities. In a survey conducted by Xplor, the electronic document systems association, workflow management systems ranked fourth among respondents who were asked what their top current investments will be. E-commerce was first followed by telecommunications infrastructure, and LANs/WANs/office systems. (For the details, see the chart.)

Most of the workflow software developers contacted by Technology Decisions for this article did not dispute those findings, although (surprise, surprise) most felt that their tools had more to offer insurers than what Xplor found rated above them.

"Everyone has an increased focus on efficiency," said Jeffery Schwalk, director of business transformation services at CSC. He said workflow solutions can do three things for an insurer: "They can reduce redundant costs, increase productivity, and improve customer service."

Matt Graver, director of product marketing for DST Systems, said that workflow systems can significantly reduce the paper chase in insurance. "Paper has two costs," he said. "There is storage and there is a more insidious cost: When you only have a file on paper it is not accessible to the rest of the company. It is not easily transported. There are infinite opportunities to lose it. A million things can go wrong."

Bill Zastrow, vice president of corporate marketing for Tower Technology, said there are three important reasons for insurers to look into workflow solutions. "Growth stability," he said. "Use technology instead of hiring more people. Also, it offers your company a strategic advantage for cycle time, which means better customer service. Third, you can do the same amount of work with fewer people. [It can] cut your costs."

Needless to say, the staff can get nervous when it hears the words "workflow solution." What they think they are hearing is "layoffs." But Zastrow said that most companies are looking for growth, not to cut back their current workforces. Adding business without adding personnel makes the CEO a happy guy.

Dan Sobotincic, CTO and partner with Concise Technology-which was purchased in May by Sherwood International, said that workflow enables an insurer to complete the entire policy process in a matter of hours, not days. "Efficiency and turnaround time are the biggest benefits," he said. Once an agent asks for a quote, the entire process can kick in without waiting for each player to take a turn. "That quick turnaround is the biggest payback," Sobotincic said. "The quicker you can close on a policy the less likely you are to lose that business to someone else."

Simplicity is a key for a good system, according to Brett Roeder, director of product marketing at Seagull. "When you look at workflow you have a lot of difficult functions," he said. "You can take a complicated process and make it so mere mortals, with no training, can sit down and go through it."

Of course, sometimes the people you are trying to help are the ones that are complicating things.
Roeder said that his company's biggest challenge is getting to the right people when a company buys its software solution. "Our second challenge is that the technology people want to rewrite the whole system in Java," he said. "In three to five years, Java might not be the language you want to use. We've found that there are as many ways to deliver a solution as there are programmers."

There are plenty of roadblocks in insurance. Some of them were created by the industry itself, others are the natural progression of a paper society moving into an electronic world. Workflow solutions don't create turnarounds for carriers, but they make the business process more efficient and in time that means dollars. It also means that you don't have to march from cube to cube looking for the Peterson file. It's only a click away.

Workflow: The Products

Concise Technology's Front-Tier
www.concisetech.com
Concise (which was just purchased by Sherwood International) started its life as a consultant agency, but over the last five years has become product based. Its Front-Tier helps create a "common ground" for insurance connecting different technology through the Internet. Modular based, Front-Tier can connect to the insurer's front end for transactions or interface to the back end of the insurer's system. "It is up to them to see what modules they pick," said Sobotincic.

Workflow means different things to different companies, he said. "Different architecture gets bumped under the workflow umbrella," Sobotincic said. "Document routing software is being called workflow. True workflow is process monitoring."

He said that doesn't mean the physical document, but the actual process. Insurers will never fully cut the cord on paper. "Insurance is a paper industry," he said. "Customers want to see a physical document."

Sobotincic said there are four keys to Concise's success. "It is a tool set so you can visually model workflow," he said. "We are process-centric. We don't route documents, but the process. We have an open technology, which is easy to interface with other applications. It is all done in real time, not layered on a e-mail system."

DST Systems's Automated Work Distributor
www.dstsystems.com
DST's Automated Work Distributor (AWD) allows insurers to increase their focus on customer relationships, according to Matt Graver, director of product marketing. AWD captures e-mail, Internet contacts, telephone calls, faxes, mail, and electronic transactions with pre-defined business rules-it's also aware of the skill level of associates who are available to respond. All the contact information is stored so the CSR can frame future contacts with previous contacts.

"It is a broad offering," Graver said. "It is used differently by clients for document management, process management, and workflow."

One of the benefits of AWD is that it's a modular solution. "You only have to buy what you need," Graver said. It's accessible through the Internet, which allows it to support customer communication through corporate Web sites, making what DST calls 'a CRM environment.'

The key to workflow is efficiency, Graver said, and AWD increases that efficiency by pushing priority work to the desktops. Users can't pick and choose items they prefer to work on, either. "This streamlines the efficiency of the organization," said Graver.

"Productivity is not gained through sweeping changes, but in incremental steps. A lot of times, the way you get it is as simple as eliminating a few keystrokes."

Inspire's Empower
www.nspr.com
Gordon Gaar, CTO of Inspire, said that to run policy and claims administrations efficiently, "you have to be able to use the tools effectively." Inspire's tool is Empower, which he called "an enabler to the back end."
Even with a minimal amount of information on a customer, an account can be directed to the right people. "It brings it to the right screen with the customer information," he said.

Gaar said Inspire's customers see the images they need on a monitor without passing folders around. "As pressure in the industry drives better efficiencies to reduce costs, this will become a key enabler to how they run their businesses," he said.

Many of Inspire's customers are small- to medium-sized insurers that are interested in helping their agents sell more policies. They can't do that if they are waiting for policies to be rated, underwritten, and issued. According to Gaar, creating efficiencies is more important than spending money on e-commerce solutions, because insurance customers still want to deal with an agent. "That market has not gone the way as quickly as people thought," he said.

While some workflow providers brag about cutting the paper trail, Gaar said that the real dollars are made when employees can increase productivity. "I don't know about you, but my biggest line is still salary, not paper," he said.

InSystems' Calligo and Tracker
www.insystems.com
Document management goes hand in hand with workflow, according to Keith Fraser, group product manager for InSystems. Combining the two allows an insurer to automate the entire process. "When you create a group contract there are a lot of handoffs," Fraser said. "This allows you to map the process based on roles and rules."

He said that companies struggle with the handoff process, but Calligo enables them to create a system that is more efficient. "One of our customers was able to cut its system of file handoffs down from 26 to six," said Fraser.

High volume batch processing allows customers to print large numbers of documents outside of business hours. The Calligo Toolkit allows users to deploy the system in the background, enabling users to use a familiar application and allow other software providers to integrate their solutions with Calligo.

Tracker is InSystems' workflow tool for dealing with filings with the various departments of insurance in the states where carriers do business. Tracker works for both the regulators and the carriers, speeding the filing process and increasing productivity, according to Debbi Marquette, director of compliance solutions for InSystems.

"In seconds you know where every piece of the filing is," Marquette said. "As you build up your database, you'll know how long it takes to get a product to market. Some carriers didn't concentrate on this in the past, but the issue of product to market is now a big focus for insurers."

Seagull Software's TigerRay and J Walk
www.seagullsw.com
A company's workflow needs will be the determining factor in which of Seagull's products, TigerRay or J Walk, is best suited for it. "It depends on the client's current environment," said Roeder. "That determines which would be most appropriate-an end-to-end system that allows a full function, or an application."

According to Roeder, Seagull has "a full suite to deal with legacy applications." Getting customers to move from green screens to the Web sometimes involves 'baby steps,' he said, but "anything you need to do with a legacy system, we have the application."

Being Web-based can mean great savings for an insurer when dealing with agents. One customer saved $100,000 by offering the functions across its Internet site instead of sending out new versions of the software on CD-ROM. The savings in paper costs can also be impressive. Field reports done electronically can be sent to more than one location at the same time, according to Roeder.

Tower Technology's Tower IDM
www.towertech.com
Tower "focuses on infrastructure for document and content processing," said Bill Zastrow, the company's vice president of corporate marketing. Tower IDM is a document and content repository "that automatically kicks in workflow."

The system is also a database and the workflow tools "take advantage of that electronic form," he said, although he disputes the view that workflow tools are a long-term investment. "Systems can pay back in as little as eight months or as long as a couple of years," he said.

Tower IDM takes successful accounts and deploys them first. "When you reduce the time to deploy and you reduce costs you don't run out of the technology runway," he said. "That's the definition of experience."